page_title: Collaboration with the Axis Powers
section_title: Serbs
hierarchical_section_title: Collaboration with the Axis Powers / Collaboration by country / Yugoslavia / Serbs
caption_attribution_description: English: A group of Chetniks pose with German soldiers in an unidentified village in Serbia.
context_page_description: Within nations occupied by the Axis powers in World War II, some citizens and organizations, prompted by nationalism, ethnic hatred, anti-communism, antisemitism, opportunism, self-defense, or often a combination, knowingly collaborated with the Axis Powers. Some of these collaborators committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or atrocities of the Holocaust.
  Collaboration has been defined as cooperation between elements of the population of a defeated state and representatives of a victorious power. Stanley Hoffmann subdivided collaboration into involuntary and voluntary. According to Hoffmann, collaborationism can be subdivided into "servile" and "ideological"; the former is deliberate service to an enemy, whereas the latter is deliberate advocacy of cooperation with a foreign force which is seen as a champion of desirable domestic transformations. In contrast, Bertram Gordon uses the terms "collaborator" and "collaborationist", respectively, in reference to non-ideological and ideological collaborations.
context_section_description: Serbian collaborationist organizations the Serbian State Guard and the Serbian Volunteer Corps, the party militia of the extreme right-wing Yugoslav National Movement "Zbor", lead by Dimitrije Ljotić, had over 30,000 members and helped guard and run concentration camps, and fought the Yugoslav Partisans alongside the Germans. There was over 1000 Serbs in the mainly Volksdeutsche Waffen-SS Prinz Eugen division by 1944. Civilians collaborated to deport Jews to work camps in The General Government, resulting in Serbia being the second fully "judenfrei" country in Europe.
  Most Chetniks in Yugoslavia collaborated with the Axis occupation to one degree or another in order to fight the rival Partisan resistance, whom they viewed as their primary enemy, by establishing modus vivendi or operating as "legalised" auxiliary forces under Axis control. Some units engaged in marginal resistance activities and avoided accommodations with the enemy. Over a period of time, and in different parts of the country, the Chetniks were drawn progressively into collaboration agreements: first with the Nedić forces in Serbia, then with the Italians in occupied Dalmatia and Montenegro, with some of the Ustaše forces in northern Bosnia, and after the Italian capitulation also with the Germans directly. While Chetnik collaboration reached "extensive and systematic" proportions, the Chetniks themselves referred to this policy of collaboration as "using the enemy".
caption: Chetniks pose with German soldiers
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